DeWereldMorgen

DeWereldMorgen is a free Belgian alternative media website, started in March 2010 as a synergy between Pala.be[3] (in Dutch) and the Belgian section of Independent Media Center. It is operated by a core of professional journalists and which receives contributions from ±300 volunteers per year.[4] DeWereldMorgen's total revenue for 2010 was €366,707.28, but nevertheless made a loss of €9,000 (most expenses go to personnel costs, and rent of buildings and rooms). The editorial core is given a monthly salary.[5]

DeWereldMorgen
Logo of DeWereldMorgen
FormatOnline
FoundedMarch, 2010
LanguageDutch[1]
HeadquartersVan Arteveldestraat 17, 2060 Antwerp, Belgium[2]
WebsiteDeWereldMorgen.be

All its content is submitted under a Creative Commons license,[1] namely CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 BE.[6]

Alternative

Kaat Van Damme's master thesis claims that DeWereldMorgen can be defined as an "alternative media" website with regards to content, editing, and business model.[5] In the Belgian context, DeWereldMorgen has been coined together with Apache[7][5] and Mondiaal Nieuws as alternative news media.[8] It is characterized by politicization.[8]

Content

The website aims to be independent of big media organizations and features the voices of non-governmental organizations and social movements. It also collaborates with similar partners such as StampMedia[9] and rekto:verso. It can be characterized as preferring to be correct, rather than neutral.[5]

In relation to climate change, Yves Pepermans characterized DeWereldMorgen as coming "closest to a democratic arena" (compared with other Belgian newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen); and has claimed it criticizes the role of markets and stakeholders in relation to climate change, and that it advocates for larger public control over the economy for a socially just outcome for climate change. However, its addition to the debate is one-sided, and the media outlet has few readers.[10]

Editing

Other than traditional media, there is less contrast between the professional journalist and the reader. Reactions can be posted even anonymously, and can only rarely be removed. Further more, DeWereldMorgen encourages readers to contribute to the website via a section of the website called "Community".[5] Even though everybody can create new articles in the "Community",[11] DeWereldMorgen is critical of the model of gatewatching: instead, a professional redaction selects articles for promotion to the front page.[11] DeWereldMorgen also tries to inform its readers about changes within the website.[5]

Business model

Because DeWereldMorgen presents oneself as a "movement for media and democracy", they receive subsidies; without which they would have serious financial troubles. Other than these subsidies, it is mostly dependent on financial partners, which can create a bias towards no negative articles about those partners. Micropayments, book sales, donations and lectures generate a smaller part of its revenue. In 2010, €32,110.97 was donated to DeWereldMorgen, possibly by people who cancel their paid subscription to another newspaper.[5] DeWereldMorgen is sponsored by trade unions.[12]

60% of the total revenue for 2010 was received via subsidies, some of which stem from the European Union and from different departments of the Flemish Community, such as the Department of popular education (Dutch: Afdeling volksontwikkeling). While DeWereldMorgen thinks it receives much too little subsidies in comparison to other media,[5] an extreme-right nationalist website called "REACT" (where Vlaams Belang, Voorpost and nl:Vlaamse Solidaire Vakbond advertise)[13] criticizes the website and its subsidies in denigrating language.[14]

Scholarly interest

A master thesis has analysed the platform in relation to Apache[7] (another Belgian alternative media website) in 2010,[5] and a post-doctoral linguist analyses it with regards to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen.[12][15] It has been contrasted with newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen in a 2015 PhD thesis; in relation to politicization of climate change,[16] and it has been subjected to a case-study of "positionality" and "the environmental justice frame".[17]

References
  1. "About CC". Creative Commons Belgium. Retrieved 17 July 2016. DeWereldMorgen.be is a Dutch-speaking Belgian news website. All content is submitted under a CC license.
  2. "Over DeWereldMorgen.be (FAQ)". DeWereldMorgen. Retrieved 17 July 2016. DeWereldMorgen.be bestaat niet alleen op het net. Iedereen is welkom een bezoekje aan de redactie te brengen. Momenteel resideren we in de Van Arteveldestraat 17 in 2060 Antwerpen, kom gerust eens langs.
  3. PALA vzw
  4. "Over DeWereldMorgen.be (FAQ)". DeWereldMorgen. Retrieved 17 July 2016. De site wordt gerund door een kleine kern van professionele journalisten. Daarnaast werken honderden vrijwilligers meer of minder intensief mee aan het project: als auteurs, als eindredacteurs, als vertaler, als administratieve kracht, door mee te denken of logistiek te ondersteunen. Jaarlijks leveren zo'n 300 vrijwilligers een geschreven, gefilmde of gefotografeerde bijdrage aan de site.
  5. Van Damme, Kaat (2011). tes (PDF) (M.Sc. thesis). Ghent University. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  6. "[Homepage]". DeWereldMorgen. Retrieved 17 July 2016. 2010-2016 DeWereldMorgen.be. CC. BY. NC. ND.
  7. Apache – Inhoud heerst
  8. Maeseele, Pieter. "Hybridity and the News Hybrid Forms of Journalism in the 21st Century. Book of Abstracts" (PDF). VUB. Retrieved 17 July 2016. Furthermore, we also find that especially traditional news journalism is characterized by depoliticization, while alternative journalistic examples – where existing journalistic news conventions are exceeded – are rather characterized by politicization. In this paper we will first focus on how this takes place in the case of alternative news media such as DeWereldMorgen.be and Mo*.
  9. C.H.I.P.S. StampMedia | jongerenmedia-agentschap
  10. Yves John Pepermans (24 April 2015). "Doctoraatsverdediging Yves Pepermans: Manufacturing Climate Consent. From a depoliticized consenus to politicized debate". Facebook. Retrieved 17 July 2016. Artikels in DeWereldMorgen bekritiseren de rol van marktwerking en belangengroepen in het veroorzaken en vermijden van klimaatverandering en benadrukken het belang van grotere publieke controle over de economie om tot een sociaal rechtvaardig klimaatakkoord te komen. [...] DeWereldMorgen komt het dichtst bij het ideaal van een democratische arena waarin de maatschappelijke grondoorzaken, en tegengestelde beleidskeuzes, belangen en oplossingsstrategieën, bediscussieerd worden, maar bereikt dan weer weinig lezers en laat ook vooral maar één specifieke kant van het debat aan bod komen.
  11. "Over DeWereldMorgen.be (FAQ)". DeWereldMorgen. Retrieved 17 July 2016. Alle blogs verschijnen in de sectie 'community'. Iedereen heeft dus de kans om bij ons zijn ei te leggen. Alleen verschijnt niet elke blog ook zomaar op de voorpagina. De website wordt beheerd door de vijf vaste journalisten en de eindredacteur van DeWereldMorgen.be. Zij bekijken de artikels die binnenkomen, redigeren ze en geven ze een plaatsje op de website.
  12. Coesemans, Roel. "Hybridity and the News Hybrid Forms of Journalism in the 21st Century. Book of Abstracts" (PDF). VUB. Retrieved 17 July 2016. Approaching news as a discursive, multimodal genre (Machin & Mayr 2012), representational strategies and multimodal meanings are studied in a rich dataset of news reports and news videos, taken from the commercial left-leaning centre newspaper De Morgen as compared to the union sponsored alternative news website DeWereldMorgen.be.
  13. "Contact". REACT. Retrieved 17 July 2016. Stop de asiel-invasie [advertisement of Voorpost.org] [...] Vlaams, nationaal & onafhankelijk [advertisement of Vlaamse Solidaire Vakbond] [...] Rechts Vlaams Rebels. Sluit aan! [advertisement of Vlaams Belang Jongeren].
  14. "Linkse webstek DeWereldMorgen slurpt 220.000 euro subsidie per jaar". REACT. 22 August 2011. Retrieved 17 July 2016. En dat betekent dus dat de extreem-linkse zeursite in 2010 liefst 220.000 euro subsidiegeld slurpte… In 2010 kwam 166.630,57 euro daarvan van de Vlaamse regering. Voor ons mag links zoveel websteks beginnen als ze willen – maar dan wel op hun eigen kosten. Waarom moet belastinggeld (altijd) gebruikt worden om de linkse hobby's recht te houden?
  15. "Roel Coesemans". KU Leuven. Retrieved 17 July 2016. In the context of Belgian media, I am currently concentrating on the alternative news website DeWereldMorgen.be in contrast to the newspaper De Morgen.
  16. Yves John Pepermans (24 April 2015). "Doctoraatsverdediging Yves Pepermans: Manufacturing Climate Consent. From a depoliticized consenus to politicized debate". Facebook. Retrieved 17 July 2016. Yves Pepermans (Universiteit Antwerpen) analyseerde de berichtgeving over klimaatverandering in De Morgen en De Standaard en op de alternatieve nieuwswebsite DeWereldMorgen tussen 2000 en 2012.
  17. Moermout, Renée. "Hybridity and the News Hybrid Forms of Journalism in the 21st Century. Book of Abstracts" (PDF). VUB. Retrieved 17 July 2016. This alternative sphere indeed is a fruitful context for alternative frames, which might counterbalance mainstream views. We demonstrate this based on a case study of the 'alternative' environmental justice frame (Hopke, 2012) - as opposed to the 'mainstream' environmental justice frame - in the coverage of the alternative Flemish website 'DeWereldMorgen'. In a qualitative framing analysis (Entman, 1991; 1993; 2004; Van Gorp, 2006) drawing on tools of discourse analysis (Richardson, 2007; van Dijk, 1988; 1998), we show that the alternative 'positionality' in alternative media feeds into the alternative 'positionality' of agents and patients in their version of the environmental justice frame (the key characteristic of 'environmental justice', according to Pulido and Pena (1998)). We summarize this illustratively introducing an 'alternative ideological square'. (van Dijk, 1998, p. 33).
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